Despite all the scientific and technological advances achieved during the twentieth century, it is a tragic fact that the problem of terrorism has not been solved and remains a real factor in our daily lives. Based on this, we can argue that the prevailing secular worldview of the last several centuries and its stated desire to establish peace and friendship by isolating religion from public relations and daily life has failed. In other words, based on the world's current condition, we can say that an understanding of peace built on a concept of humanism that rejects religious thought and morality is not enough to achieve these goals.

Ideologies recognize different ideas as hostile and different people as enemies. According to Brzezinski, the former national security advisor under President Carter (1976-80), the nineteenth-century believer in an Almighty Creator Who had the power to do anything changed into a secular fanatic who believes that our world can be turned into a paradise. Moreover, such people are willing to destroy humanity and nature to realize this goal. Totalitarian authorities of the twentieth century tried to create utopias that could control reality and all elements of a person's life. These started from public organizations and extended to individual beliefs, from the highest level to the lower levels”all from one center.(1) 

Based on this, we understand that all the hatred and animosity we are experiencing now has been caused by contemporary humanity's values and measures to define first the concept of me and then the concept of others. If that is the case, it seems that it will be impossible to achieve the much-desired peaceful environment without changing these definitions.

Anywhere in the world where hatred and animosity have resulted in conflict and war, one important factor stands out: After developed nations controlled and governed weak and undeveloped nations, they just left them with primitive farming skills and did nothing to help them build better civilizations and to industrialize.(2) Advanced nations also conducted anthropological and sociological studies of their colonized people that stressed racial, tribal, and religious differences. Later on, these differences caused ethnic and religious conflict.

The fact that many ideas about the New World Order developed after the Cold War are based on the clash of civilizations thesis gives us some ideas and clues about the conflicts that continue to confront us.(3)

If we really want to achieve global peace and dialog and end the wars and conflict caused by differences of race, color, language and feelings of hatred and animosity, we should stress a mutual identity that relies on universal values and principals. For example: We all are created by the same Creator. We are all the children of Adam and Eve, and therefore brothers and sisters. God created the world for all living creatures.

Footnotes

1. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, 1996
2. Ernest Gellner, The Mighty Pen, Times Literature Supplement (February 1993), 19
3. Samuel A. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs (summer 1993).